Chalmers Johnson vs. the Empire

[seemslikeadream]

Chalmers Johnson vs. the Empire
by Sheila K. Johnson and Tom Engelhardt, April 11, 2011

Chalmers Johnson was a stalwart of TomDispatch. He first wrote for this website on Jan. 8, 2003 (“Iraqi Wars”), barely more than a month after it was launched. The last piece he wrote in his life (“Portrait of a Sagging Empire”) was for TomDispatch as well. In the years between, he penned 28 other TD pieces on a remarkably wide range of subjects, including how the American war in Iraq was harming the human patrimony (“Smash of Civilizations”), abolishing the CIA, the dangers of our empire of bases (a subject he all but copyrighted), the bloated Pentagon budget, our fading military empire, and how militarism was driving us toward bankruptcy, among a host of subjects. For good measure, he sat down for a two-part TomDispatch interview with me that was Chalmers all the way. (“Our encounter,” as I wrote at the time, “is an interview in name only. No one has ever needed an interviewer less. I do begin with a question that had been on my mind, but it’s hardly necessary.”)

I’ve written about how we first met on the page (as I was his book editor, starting with his now-classic volume Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire) and about his death on Nov. 20, 2010. I still miss him. In our present world, overflowing with explosive, unexpected moments, I regularly wonder just what “Chal” would have made of events in Egypt, Libya, Japan, or Washington. His remarkable, restless, penetrating intelligence is missed. He was a giant.

That said, I’m pleased to offer a special kind of goodbye to him today, a memory piece on his work by Sheila Johnson, his wife, his partner in so many endeavors, and an impressive figure in her own right. It seems like a fitting way to say goodbye, remember the breadth and stature of the man, and take in the scope of his life.

In the introduction to his final book, Dismantling the Empire, America’s Last Best Hope (just out in paperback), he took up a recurring topic of interest to him: “the choice between republic and empire,” and the way “our imperial dreams stretch our means to the breaking point and threaten our future.” Among “the alternatives available to us as a nation,” he wrote, “we are choosing what I call the suicide option.” He added that “it might not have to be this way, that we could still move in a different direction.” Those were, in a sense, his last words. How true they remain three and a half months after his death. Tom
The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson

Remembering the man and his work
by Sheila K. Johnson

In going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been forcibly struck by two things. First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931 and his determination to make a decent living without “joining the establishment.” Second—and it was an unavoidable recollection—he worked with manic energy and maniacally hard all his life.

When we met in the fall of 1956, I was a 19-year-old junior at the University of California, Berkeley, “shacked up” with a boyfriend. Chal, by contrast, was six years older and had just returned from two years with the Navy in Korea, where the ship on which he was the communications officer, LST 883, had been tasked with ferrying Chinese prisoners of war from South Korea back to North Korean ports. He was living at home with his parents in Alameda to save money, and had only recently finished his master’s thesis on “thought reform” in Communist China in the period just before and after Mao Zedong took over in 1949.

When his LST was docked in Yokosuka, he started to study Japanese. As an undergraduate at Berkeley he’d majored in economics, but he was now a graduate student in political science and a teaching assistant for Robert Scalapino, whose course on “America’s Role in the Far East” I took. I had invited Chal to a Christmas party at my apartment (and even fixed him up with a date). In return, in January 1957 he decided to deliver my final grade in Scalapino’s course in person. I wasn’t home, but my boyfriend was and informed Chal that I was leaving him. (Even in those early days of “free love,” I’d concluded that for women the price was too high.)

Several weeks later, I bumped into Chal on campus and he said, “I hear you’re a free woman. Can I invite you to do something interesting one of these days?” And so our brief but intensive courtship began. We were married in May 1957 in Reno, Nev., having left the car in a 15-minute parking zone. We returned to Berkeley the next day because we both had final exams to take.

Peasant Uprisings and Japanese Spies

Robert Scalapino was then best known as a Japan scholar. (He only later became influential in the China field.) On a trip to Japan, he had microfilmed the archives of a World-War-II-era bureaucrat, Hatano Ken’ichi, who had taken home his papers for safekeeping in advance of the American firebombing of Tokyo and simply kept them. Scalapino asked Chal to index this microfilmed collection, offering him the opportunity to use it for his Ph.D. dissertation.

Thus was born Chal’s first book, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945. Hatano’s archives included reports from the Japanese army trying to conquer and pacify northern China. These focused on the stiff resistance being encountered among the peasants in that region then being organized by communist leader Mao Zedong. It seemed to Chal that these peasants weren’t simply being seduced by Communism. They were joining Mao’s movement for nationalistic reasons, thanks to the terrible “burn all, loot all, kill all” operations launched by the Japanese army, and so, in a sense, the Japanese military was propelling Mao toward future victory in a post-World-War-II civil war in China.

Published by Stanford University Press in 1962, Peasant Nationalism is still in print almost 50 years later. It certainly had its detractors, chief among them the Communist Chinese, who preferred to think of themselves as Marxist-Leninists rather than nationalists, and the defeated Kuomintang government, exiled to the island of Taiwan in 1949, which could never stomach the idea that it had deservedly lost the support of the Chinese population during World War II. For many years after the book’s publication, Chal could not get a visa to either Beijing or Taiwan.

This didn’t bother us much then because Chal was, after all, a budding Japan specialist. In 1961, a Ford Foundation grant sent us to Japan, where we lived in a small Japanese-style house in Tokyo. There, he wrote his first “scholarly” article, published by World Politics, a distinguished academic journal, in which he sought to apply the wartime Chinese experience to other revolutionary situations. In “Civilian Loyalties and Guerrilla Conflict,” he presciently argued:

“To approach the subject of guerrilla warfare as a purely military doctrine is to court disaster. … General political and economic considerations must be taken into account, such as the abilities of local elites, the nature of a country’s economy, its class structure, and a host of other variables that can only be altered by long-term reforms. By the time guerrilla warfare has actually broken out, the conflict may already be lost to the defenders and require a negotiated or stalemate solution.”

In Tokyo, Chal haunted the used bookstores of Jinbocho, and it was here that a very interesting bookseller he had met handed him a 1930s volume by Ozaki Hotsumi, a journalist who had worked in prewar Shanghai for the major Japanese newspaper Asahi. On reading the book, Chal was struck that a Japanese of that era could have written quite so frankly and insightfully about his country’s disastrous policies in China. Only later did he learn more about the author, a well-regarded journalist and adviser to the Japanese government, who, as it turned out, also became a spy for the Russians.

After Adolf Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Ozaki and Richard Sorge, the head of the spy ring, were credited with assuring the Russians that the Japanese army would strike south into Southeast Asia rather than at Russia, permitting Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to move troops from Siberia to defend Moscow against the German onslaught and so save the city. Ozaki and Sorge were both arrested in Japan in 1941 and executed in November 1944.

I believe the conundrum faced by Ozaki—his dismay over his country’s war in China and his personal decision to aid the enemy— deeply influenced Chal and affected many of his own political beliefs. As we made our way back to the U.S. in the summer of 1962 via a slow boat to Europe, Chal told me the story of Ozaki’s life, and said, “I think I’ll write an article about him.” I suggested that it sounded more like a book.

An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring came out in 1962 and, though now out of print, remains a remarkably empathetic portrait of a traitor and a spy. Meanwhile, Chal had been hired by Scalapino to teach Chinese politics at Berkeley. Because even then it was not considered intellectually “cool” to be typecast as an “area specialist,” Chal decided to offer a graduate seminar on revolutions and guerrilla warfare. This would lead to his next book, Revolutionary Change, published in 1966, an important theoretical work, but also, in hindsight, a bit nutty.

Early in our marriage Chal and I had discussed whether it was possible to construct what we called a “Fascistograph.” The idea was to come up with a checklist of things going wrong in a country that might herald the imminent arrival of fascism—so that one could get out in time. (This was, in part, triggered by conversations with some of our own professors, including Hannah Arendt, about how and when they made the decision to leave Hitler’s Germany and go into exile prior to World War II.) For Revolutionary Change, Chal tried to develop various “measures” of social disequilibrium that might indeed signal the onset of a revolution. These included rises in suicides and violent crimes, in the numbers of police and military forces, and in the circulation of certain kinds of ideological magazines.

When the book finally went out of print in 1982, Stanford University Press offered to bring out a second edition, but we all agreed that the chapter on measuring “disequilibrium” had to go. Chal replaced it with two new ones—on terrorism as a revolutionary strategy and on theories of revolution. On March 2, 1986, the Los Angeles Times reported that Gen. Juan Ponce Enrile, in abandoning Filipino autocrat Ferdinand Marcos and joining Cory Aquino’s revolution, threw three books into his knapsack: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a volume on the idea of law, and Chalmers Johnson’s Revolutionary Change. Reading that, we could only laugh and hope that the volume he grabbed was the second, revised edition (still in print in 2011).

Watching China

The decade from 1965 to 1975 could be called our China years, although it was also the crucial decade for America’s war in Vietnam and for student protests on college campuses, not least among them Berkeley. In 1965, we moved to the then-British colony of Hong Kong to spend nine months as “China Watchers.” That was communist China we were eying, of course, a place we Americans still couldn’t visit.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution was just beginning. As Chal became increasingly convinced of the harm it was inflicting on China’s people and economy, many of his students back in California were turning into sincere Maoist camp followers, even as they were also protesting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In these years, Chal became a temporary convert to “the domino theory”—the idea that “losing” one more country to communism could set off a kind of global chain reaction.

And yet, in 1973, he published a little book, Autopsy on People’s War, in which he argued that Maoist theories of “people’s war” would not lead to a general Asian conflagration. “It is useful to be reminded,” he wrote, “that revolutions in the modern sense are also, in fact, civil wars. If other nations want to make a successful adjustment to them, they cannot ignore the fact that a domestic fight is going on between people who are agitated by issues other than the general course of human history. For this reason direct intervention in one is generally the worst thing that a prudent nation can do—not because the revolution is unimportant either ideologically or to the world balance of power but because foreign intervention, if it fails, is bound to antagonize in the most direct manner the victorious revolutionary state.”

It was an uncomfortable time to be the chairman of Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies and a consultant for the CIA’s Board of National Estimates. Chal had accepted CIA Director Richard Helms’s invitation to become a consultant because he believed the Agency was then producing some of the most accurate reporting on China (and also, as would later be revealed, on Vietnam). At the same time, Chal also managed to write and publish another book about Japan, Conspiracy at Matsukawa—a complicated tale set during the post-World War II American occupation of that country that revealed a great deal about Japanese police methods and American interference in the country’s politics.

The summer it came out, Chal spent a month by himself in Japan, decompressing from five turbulent years in Berkeley. During this time he wrote me a series of charming letters about his sudden realization that he was tired of following the ups and downs of Maoist China at a distance and wanted to return to doing concrete research about Japan. An old Japanese friend suggested that he should take up the study of an important branch of Japan’s bureaucracy, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, a subject that would come to preoccupy him for a decade.

In 1974, he was the first person to explain in English the Japanese system of amakudari, whereby retired bureaucrats were hired by big businesses to smooth their future relations with the government that regulated them—not unlike the revolving door in Washington that regularly spins retiring politicians and retired military officers into the arms of large American firms eager to lobby the government.

In 1975, he published an important article, “Japan: Who Governs? An Essay on Official Bureaucracy,” but with a sabbatical from teaching looming, he also wondered whether he needed to write yet another book. Hadn’t he already written enough about MITI? “Well,” I said, “you have all of this historical material. It would be a pity just to throw it away.”

And so, in the fall of 1980, Chal began work on MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. He started, as he always did, by first reading through all his files and indexing whatever he wanted to use. Knowing the story he wanted to tell, he then wrote with intensity and speed, producing two chapters a month. He was working this fast, he told me, because the material was so complex that he could hold it in his head only a short time. With eight chapters in hand, he was exhausted. When he told me, “I was going to write a concluding chapter, but I’ve said it all, haven’t I?” I agreed.

We sent off the manuscript to Jess Bell, a friend and the publisher of Chal’s other books at Stanford University Press. He wrote back that he would, of course, publish the book, but it did need a concluding chapter, a “take-home” message. We laughed, because we realized he was right.

Chal was then well aware that one of the unusual and controversial aspects of his description of MITI and its World War II-era predecessor, the Ministry of Munitions, was the continuity between them in both practices and personnel. Unlike most books about modern Japan that drew a sharp dividing line at the Japanese defeat in 1945, Chal’s did not. He knew that his implicit message, if made explicit, might just as well have been labeled the jocular title adman Jerry Della Femina once proposed for a Panasonic ad: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Still, he wrote a concluding chapter in record time, and when the book was published in early 1982, both he and Jess were amused that reviewers singled it out for special praise.

In the fall of 1982, our home phone rang and it was Henry Rosovsky, then dean of the Harvard faculty as well as a friend who had taught at Berkeley and been a member of Chal’s Ph.D. orals committee. I knew at once what this call was about: like a summons from the Vatican, Harvard had at last decided to offer Chal a job.

Of course, we would go for a “look-over” and give it serious thought. We knew a number of people at Harvard, even if we worried about the winter climate because of Chal’s rheumatoid arthritis. As it turned out, we liked Boston and Cambridge a great deal, but Harvard struck us both as too patrician and too full of itself. Chal asked one of his Harvard friends what he would be asked to teach, and the reply was: “Oh, Chalmers, at the level you’re being hired, you don’t have to teach anything you don’t want to. The only thing you must never refuse is a request to speak to the Harvard alumni.”

As we flew back to California, Chal commented glumly, “They want me as a moose-head professor—to hang my head on the wall and say they’ve bagged me.” We chose to stay at Berkeley for another six years.

Back to Economics

Even before the MITI book was published, the Japanese had expressed an interest in translating it, and the first reactions there were great pride in Chal’s description of their postwar economic growth and how it had been achieved. But as Japan’s trade deficits with the U.S. grew along with calls for U.S. tariffs on Japanese automobiles and other products, Chal came to be characterized as a “Japan-basher.”

It’s true that writing MITI and the Japanese Miracle had reawakened his interest in economic theory, and he did, in the end, come to agree with critics who accused Japan of not providing a level playing field. He was, however, also interested in seeing the U.S. adopt some of Japan’s state-guided development methods or “industrial policy.” This was anathema to most American economists and politicians, and so Chal came under attack from Americans as well. When Japan’s economy became stagnant, while China’s (also heavily state-guided) economy began to grow rapidly, MITI’s methods were simply dismissed in the United States.

In the winter of 1985, Chal had his first major “episode” of rheumatoid arthritis, a disease he had been diagnosed with in his early twenties. In fact, a Navy doctor even suggested he could use it to avoid serving in the military, a suggestion that Chal declined. For the next 30 years, he survived on large doses of aspirin or stronger painkillers. Then, in the space of a few hours, he suddenly was running a high fever, while his body, painful even to the touch of a sheet, became as rigid as an I-beam. A week in the hospital on heavy doses of cortisone sent him back to the university with a cane and the need to lecture sitting down. Like a midlife heart attack, that incident acted as a wake-up call, and we began to think about moving to a warmer, drier climate.

In 1987, the San Diego campus of the University of California was creating a new School of International Relations and Pacific Studies that would offer an MA combining business courses with Asian area studies and languages. It seemed like an interesting experiment and a good fit for Chal’s interests and abilities. When he began working there in 1988, Chal was 57 years old and we assumed that he would teach for at least eight more years. Then as now, however, the state of California was experiencing big budget deficits and the university was anxious to retire highly paid senior professors and replace them with cheaper, often temporary, staff.

So in 1992, Chal took early retirement. His departure was acrimonious because by then it was clear that much of the faculty at his school was determined to study Asia through the lens of “rational choice theory.” Much like other theories that sweep through academic disciplines—structural-functionalism, behaviorism, Marxism—rational choice theory provided a template (with its own specialized, jargonistic vocabulary) to explain how nations function, whereas Chal’s approach was always to proceed inductively, beginning with the data on the ground.

He wrote several stinging, acerbic articles about trends in academic political science, and then—quite by accident—he was offered a chance to form a small “think-tank” in which to showcase what he considered good research on Asian societies. It was called the Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI), and for almost 12 years it would publish monthly papers on north and southeast Asia, hold conferences open to the public, promote books, and focus attention on much neglected policy issues, including the heavily U.S.-garrisoned Japanese island of Okinawa, which Chal came to call “the American Raj.”

The Blowback Era

In 1991, the Soviet Union simply disappeared and the Cold War was officially over, but as Chal quickly noted, no “peace dividend” followed. The American Raj simply sailed blissfully on as if nothing whatsoever had happened. This caught Chal’s attention, along with what he later came to call “the American empire of bases” and the full-scale garrisoning of the planet that went with it. For the rest of his life he would focus his energies on the subject of American militarism, an ever more bloated military-industrial complex, and of course the growing power of the Pentagon, which in a weird sense functioned as an American MITI.

On Sept. 4, 1995, three American servicemen abducted and raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl, provoking widespread anger and demonstrations on the island. In response, Chal began to write extensively about those American bases on Okinawa, which had been established as World War II ended and never stopped growing. In late September of the following year, he was invited by the island’s governor to address members of the prefectural government and tour the island. Never one to mince words, Chal also spoke at Tokyo’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club after his trip and summed up the Okinawan situation this way: “The American government is the rapist; the Japanese government is the pimp.”

In March, 1998, U.S. News and World Report carried a small piece of his called “Enter the Dragon: Ten Reasons to Worry About Asia’s Economic Crisis.” Literary agent Sandra Dijkstra read it and contacted Chal to see whether he was thinking about writing a book on the subject. As a matter of fact he was, having decided to distill his 40 years of studying and teaching about China, Japan, and Korea into essays that would reflect on U.S. policy in Asia since World War II.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had acquired an empire but, Chal argued, so had we. After the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe and many parts of the Soviet Union itself—Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan—declared their independence, while the U.S. only expanded its overseas military bases. Chal decided to call his book Blowback (a term of tradecraft he’d first heard at the CIA for operations so secret that when they “blew back” on the U.S., ordinary Americans had no clue as to the connection). Even in those relatively quiet years of the 1990s when American pundits and others spoke of this country as the “sole superpower” on planet Earth, or even its towering “hyperpower,” he became convinced that there would be a time of reckoning for the U.S., as there had been for the Soviet Union, and that it would not be as far off as almost everyone imagined.

Chal explained what happened next:

“I wrote Blowback between 1997 and 1999, and it was published in March 2000 [by Metropolitan Books]. In the summer of 2000, I signed another contract with [Metropolitan] to write a new book, but at that time I conceived it as a book about Asia—particularly China, Japan, and Korea—and their relationships with the U.S. Blowback sold reasonably well throughout 2000 and the first part of 2001, but after 9/11 it suddenly began to jump off bookstore shelves. So I stopped and wrote a new, post-9/11 preface to Blowback and did a lot of journalism and radio interviews; and I found that I had quite a lot more to say on the whole subject of blowback and, more particularly, on how the American government was reacting to the threat of terrorism and al-Qaeda. I scrapped my earlier book outline and wrote a new one, and for the next 15 months I worked like someone possessed on this new book.”

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic was published in January 2004. At its heart lay a region by region anatomy of America’s global “baseworld” and how it worked, a subject that remained remarkably undiscussed and unanalyzed in this country. Subsequently, Chal gave many speeches and interviews in an effort to help deny George W. Bush—“likely the single worst president in the history of the American republic”—a second term. When Bush was reelected and the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan continued to take their human and economic toll, he became determined to write a third book in what would become The Blowback Trilogy.

This time his tone was more alarmist, while his focus was on the way an American version of military Keynesianism was failing the country. He feared that the U.S. would be simultaneously overwhelmed by related tides of militarism and bankruptcy. Reflecting his own grim mood, he chose for his title the name of the Greek goddess of myth whose task was to punish human arrogance and hubris: Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. In it, he pulled together many of his thoughts about the fate of empires—particularly the Roman and British ones—and predicted that, in the reasonably near future, the U.S. would have to choose between remaining a democratic society or becoming a military dictatorship.

Nemesis was published in January 2007, and given Chal’s increasing arthritic debility (by then, he was often using a wheelchair), I didn’t expect him to write another book. He was, by then, reading so many books by others (including Andrew Bacevich, Steve Coll, Tim Weiner, and Tim Shorrock) on events of the moment that he continued to produce a steady stream of op-eds, articles, and reviews. By the spring of 2009, Tom Engelhardt, the editor of The Blowback Trilogy and director of the website TomDispatch.com, suggested that there were enough of his recent essays to collect in a small volume. The three of us read through them and Tom, with his usual talent for discovering a path through the underbrush, found the common thread.

By the time Dismantling the Empire was published in April 2010, the sustained work Chal had kept up for more than 50 years was simply beyond him. He could barely move or sign his name. In September, even that became impossible. We had decided that more hospital stays were not what we wanted, and so on Sept. 15, 2010, he entered hospice care. A hospital bed was delivered to our family room, overlooking our garden and the Pacific Ocean that had played such an important role in his life. Friends could visit, we watched the TV news every evening, and our cat Seiji (successor to felines Miti and Mof) slept at his feet.

As his life slowly ebbed, Chal would sometimes exclaim in great agitation, “I don’t know what to do.” I always replied, “You don’t have to do anything, you’ve done enough.” Toward the end, he changed this line to “I can’t do it anymore.” By then, I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the intellectual tasks he’d always set himself or about life itself.

Chal was a formidable and—I’m tempted to say—driven man. After his death, I received a letter from a high school friend who said much the same thing. “I always admired Chal’s ability to really focus in on an interest. I hate to use the word, but it bordered on zealotry. An example was his ‘passion’ for collecting streetcar and bus transfer slips. As I recall, they were colorful and contained a lot of information about the routes.”

I had to laugh when I read this, and I offer it as a piece of advice to parents who may have similarly focused kids: don’t worry if they’re memorizing baseball statistics. It may lead to something far more important.

Sheila K. Johnson is an anthropologist, freelance writer, and editor. Her husband’s final book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan Books), has just appeared in paperback.

Copyright 2011 Sheila K. Johnson

[Allegro]

Highlights mine. Links in original.

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Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
Originally written by Chalmers Johnson; posted by TomDispatch | August 22, 2013

However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there—49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony—that is, control or dominance—over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past—including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that “[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., the president again insisted, “Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.” And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that “[w]e will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:


“America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony.”

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:


“Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them... He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases.”

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, “Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe.” According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush’s imperial adventures—if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history—to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories—the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain’s foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): “Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland.” An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which—just as British imperial officials did—has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own “political agent” who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):


“If Washington’s bureaucrats don’t remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world’s sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States.”

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: “We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers” (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of “collateral damage,” or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts, among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009 General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service’s focus on Afghanistan, “Pakistan has always been the problem.” They add:

“Pakistan’s army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s] and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan’s army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government.” (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train “freedom fighters” throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan’s consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: “Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India.”

Obama’s mid-2009 “surge” of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland’s continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union’s, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, “Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing.” He continued:


“New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults—2,923—and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.”

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. “The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious,” writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called “Status of Forces Agreements” (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret “understanding” as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of “national importance to Japan.” The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the “culture of unpunished sexual assaults” and the “shockingly low numbers of courts martial” for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them—the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can’t or won’t.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters—along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth—that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

_________________
Chalmers Johnson was the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999). His final book was Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (2010).

[Note on further reading on the matter of sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and rapes in the military: On the response to the 1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil, “Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan SOFA,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15, 2009; “Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S. Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being Prosecuted,” Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009; Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001; Minoru Matsutani, “‘53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived GI Prosecutions,” Japan Times, October 24, 2008; “Crime Without Punishment in Japan,” the Economist, December 10, 2008; “Japan: Declassified Document Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over U.S. Forces,” Akahata, October 30, 2008; “Government’s Decision First Case in Japan,” Ryukyu Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, “Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military,” Antiwar.com, May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, “The Plight of Women Soldiers,” the Nation, May 5, 2009.]

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Copyright 2010 Chalmers Johnson

[coffin_dodger]

Thanks for that article, Allegro - it really reinforces just how out of control military spending (and the dependancy upon) is in the US.

However, it is a chicken and egg conundrum. The article makes a case that the US simply cannot afford to monetarily sustain its military presence around the world any more - but what is money these days? Money is not a physical thing, unlike the gold standard of old. The dollar, since the 70's, is a monetary system used by the world to trade that is backed by, and enforced with, the might of US military presence around the globe and the prestige (and implicit threat) that brings with it.
Scaling back on military expenditure can only serve to loosen the grip (on power, ergo monetary system) that an already shaky $ is suffering from. Tricky.

Scale back -> reduce power and influence -> loss of prestige of $ -> US standard of living reduces
Scale up -> increase power and influence -> stronger $ -> maintained or increased US standard of living.

The very nature of a fiat currency is based upon full faith and credit of the issuer. I'm inclined to think that the US is more likely to want to strengthen, not diminish, it's hold on the world reserve currency. I'd expect to see increased military spending, even in a society that cannot 'afford' it.

[seemslikeadream]

1078166, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”
Posted by seemslikeadream on Sat Jun-09-07 11:16 AM

She's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her - to carry out her divine mission




http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl? ... 27/1454229
In his new book, CIA analyst, distinguished scholar, and best-selling author Chalmers Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation’s collapse as a constitutional republic. It’s the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling "Blowback" and "The Sorrows of Empire." In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to un-intended, but direct disaster here in the United States. [includes rush transcript]

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is also President of the Japan Policy Research Institute. Johnson has written for several publications including Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary film, "Why We Fight."

Chalmers Johnson joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about the title of his book, "Nemesis."

Chalmers Johnson, Author, scholar and leading critic of US foreign policy. Retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is also President of the Japan Policy Research Institute. His new book is "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic."
TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with the former CIA consultant, distinguished scholar, best-selling author, Chalmers Johnson. He’s just published a new book. It’s called Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It’s the last volume in his trilogy, which began with Blowback, went onto The Sorrows of Empire. In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to unintended but direct disaster here in the United States. In his new book, Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation’s collapse as a constitutional republic.

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He’s also president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. He’s written for a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s magazine and The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary, Why We Fight. Chalmers Johnson joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about the title of his book, Nemesis.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she’s present in our country right now, just waiting to make her — to carry out her divine mission.
By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books — "The Last Days of the American Republic." I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is — that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire — that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.
I’ve spent some time in the book talking about an alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the decision to give up its empire in order to keep its democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown, India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became, I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they, therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to give up their empire.
As I say, they didn’t do it perfectly. There were tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo, French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the Kikuyu — savage repression, really — in Kenya; and then, of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all, Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something we should be discussing very hard in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, you connect the breakdown of constitutional government with militarism.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the signs of the breakdown of constitutional government and how it links?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, yes. Militarism is the — what the social scientists call the "intervening variable," the causative connection. That is to say, to maintain an empire requires a very large standing army, huge expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of interests that lead to perpetual series of wars.
It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever delivered to us by our first president, George Washington, in his famous farewell address. It’s read at the opening of every new session of Congress. Washington said that the great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are intended to check each other. This is our most fundamental bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny. It causes it to break down, because standing armies, militarism, military establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power away from the rest of the country to Washington, including taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency, who then implements the military’s desire for secrecy, making oversight of the government almost impossible for a member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen.
It seems to me that this is also the same warning that Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of 1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite undiplomatic language — one ought to go back and read Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that was not under effective control of the interests of the military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We know from his writings that he intended to say a military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off from going that far. But it’s in that sense that I believe the nexus — or, that is, the incompatibility between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was he warned by?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Members of Congress. Republican memb—
AMY GOODMAN: And why were they opposed?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, they did not want to have their oversight abilities impugned. They weren’t carrying them out very well. You must also say that Eisenhower was — I think he’s been overly praised for this. It was a heroic statement, but at the same time, he was the butcher of Guatemala, the person who authorized our first clandestine operation and one of the most tragic that we ever did: the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 for the sake of the British Petroleum Company. And he also presided over the fantastic growth of the military-industrial complex, of the lunatic oversupply of nuclear weapons, of the empowering of the Air Force, and things of this sort. It seems to be only at the end that he realized what a monster he had created.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We’ll come back to him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we return to my interview with Chalmers Johnson — his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic — I asked him to talk about the expansion of US military bases around the globe.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: According to the official count right now — it’s something called the Base Structure Report, which is an unclassified Pentagon inventory of real property owned around the world and the cost it would take to replace it — there are right now 737 American military bases on every continent, in well over 130 countries. Some apologists from the Pentagon like to say, well, this is false, that we’re counting Marine guards at embassies. I guarantee you that it’s simply stupid. We don’t have anything like 737 American embassies abroad, and all of these are genuine military bases with all of the problems that that involves.
In the southernmost prefecture of Japan, Okinawa, site of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, there’s a small island, smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000 Okinawans. There’s thirty-seven American military bases there. The revolt against them has been endemic for fifty years. The governor is always saying to the local military commander, "You’re living on the side of a volcano that could explode at any time." It has exploded in the past. What this means is just an endless, nonstop series of sexually violent crimes, drunken brawls, hit-and-run accidents, environmental pollution, noise pollution, helicopters falling out of the air from Futenma Marine Corps Air Base and falling onto the campus of Okinawa International University. One thing after another. Back in 1995, we had one of the most serious incidents, when two Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a twelve-year-old girl. This led to the largest demonstrations against the United States since we signed the security treaty with Japan decades ago. It’s this kind of thing.
I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction — I’ve not made a secret of it — that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don’t come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical.
These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we’re going to have an enlarged one.
Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn’t ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we’re talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That’s a contradiction in terms. It doesn’t work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation. Nemesis becomes appropriate.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, there have been major protests against US military bases. Recently in Vicenza in Italy, about 100,000 people protested. Ecuador announced that it would close the Manta Air Base, the military base there. What about the response, the resistance to this web of bases around the world?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, there is a genuine resistance and has been for a long time. As I say, in the case of Okinawa, there’s been at least three different historical revolts against the American presence. There’s collaboration between the Japanese government and the Pentagon to use this island, which is a Japanese version of Puerto Rico. It’s a place that’s always been discriminated against. It’s the Japanese way of having their cake and eating it, too. They like the alliance with America, but they do not want American soldiers based anywhere near the citizens of mainland Japan. So they essentially dump them or quarantine them off into this island, where the population pays the cost.
This is true, what’s going on in Italy right now, where there is tremendous resistance to the CIA rendition cases. That is, kidnapping people that we’ve identified and flying them secretly to countries where we know they will be tortured. There’s right now something like twenty-five CIA officers by name who are under indictment by the Italian government for felonies committed by agents of the United States in Italy. And, indeed, we just did have these major demonstrations in Vicenza. The people there believe that with the enlargement of the base that is already there — I mean, this is, after all, the old Palladian city, a city of great and famous architecture, that they would become a target of terrorism, of numerous other things.
We see the resistance in the form of Prime Minister Zapatero in Spain, that he promised the people that after he came to power, he would get out of Iraq, and he was one of the few who did deliver, who does remember that if democracy means anything, it means that public opinion matters, though in an awful lot of countries, it doesn’t actually seem to be the case. But he has reduced radically the American military presence in Spain.
And it continues around the world. There is a growing irritation at the American colossus athwart the world, using its military muscle to do as it pleases. We see it right now, that people of the Persian Gulf are not being asked whether or not they want anywhere between two and four huge carrier task forces in the fifth fleet in CENTCOM’s navy in the Persian Gulf, and all of which looks like preparation for an assault on Iran. We don’t know that for certain by any manner of means, but there’s plenty enough to make us suspicious.
Then you look back historically, probably there is no more anti-American democracy on earth than Greece. They will never forgive us for bringing to power the Greek colonels the in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and, of course, also establishing then numerous American military enclaves in Greece until the colonels themselves finally self-destructed by simply going too far.
And the cases are ubiquitous in Latin America, in Africa today. Probably still the most important area, of course, of military imperialism is the opening up of southern Eurasia, after it became available to foreign imperialistic pressure with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many important observers who have resigned their commissions from the Pentagon have made the case that the fundamental explanation for the war in Iraq was precisely to make it the new — to replace the two old pillars of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The first pillar, Iran, collapsed, of course, with the revolution in 1979 against the Shah, who we had installed in power. The second pillar, Saudi Arabia, had become less and less useful to us, because of our own bungling. We put forces, military forces, ground forces, an air force, in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War in 1991. This was unnecessary, it was stupid, it was arrogant. It caused antagonism among numerous patriotic Saudis, not least of whom, one was our former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden — that Saudi Arabia is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. We ought to be able to do this ourselves without using infidel troops that know absolutely nothing about our religion, our country, our lifestyle, or anything else. Over time, the Saudis began to restrict the use of Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh. We actually closed down our major operations headquarters there just before the invasion of Iraq and moved it to Qatar.
And then we chose Iraq as the second most oil-rich country on earth, and as a place perfectly suited for our presence. I think many people have commented on it, Seymour Hersh notably, but I think, importantly, one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave. And certainly the evidence of it is the now series of at least five very, very large, heavily reinforced, long double runways, five air bases in Iraq, strategically located all over the country. You can never get our ambassador, the Department of Defense, the President, or anybody to say unequivocally we don’t intend to have bases there. It’s a subject on which Congress never, ever opens its mouth. Occasionally, military officers — the commander of Air Force in CENTCOM has repeatedly, in his sort of off-hand way, when asked, "How long do you think we’ll be here?" and he usually says, "Oh, at least a decade in these bases." And then, we continue to reinforce them.
Now, then, we’ve tried to build bases in Central Asia in the Caspian Basin oil-rich countries that were made independent — not in any sense democracies — made independent by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We have now been thrown out of one of them for too much heavy-handed interference. And the price of our stay in Kyrgyzstan has quadrupled, much more than that actually. It’s gone from a few million dollars to well over $100 million. But we continue to play these games, and they are games, and the game is property called imperialism.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Chalmers Johnson. Now, Chalmers Johnson, you were a consultant for the CIA for a period through Richard Nixon, starting with Johnson in 1967, right through 1973. And I’m wondering how you see its use has changed. You talk about, and you write in your book about the Central Intelligence Agency, the president’s private army.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: I say, at one point, we will never know peace until we abolish it, or, at any rate, restrict what is the monster that it’s grown into. The National Security Act of 1947 lists five functions. It creates the Central Intelligence Agency. It lists five functions for it. The purpose, above all, was to prevent surprise attack, to prevent a recurrence of the attack, such as the one at Pearl Harbor. Of these five functions, four are various forms of information-gathering through open sources, espionage, signals intelligence, things of this sort. The fifth is simply a catchall, that the CIA will do anything that the National Security Council, namely the foreign affairs bureaucracy in the White House attached directly to the president orders it to do.
That’s turned out to be the tail that wags the dog. Intelligence is not taken all that seriously. It’s not that good. My function inside the agency in the late '60s, early ’70s was in the Office of National Estimates. My wife used to ask me at times, "Why are they so highly classified?" And I said, "Well, probably and mostly, simply because they're the very best we can do, and they read like a sort of lowbrow foreign affairs article." They’re not full of great technical detail and certainty nothing on sources of intelligence.
But as the agency developed over time, and as it was made clear to the president, every president since Truman, made clear to them shortly after they were inaugurated, you have at your disposal a private army. It is totally secret. There is no form of oversight. There was no form of congressional oversight until the late 1970s, and it proved to be incompetent in the face of Iran-Contra and things like that. He can do anything you want to with it. You could order assassinations. You could order governments overthrown. You could order economies subverted that seemed to get in our way. You could instruct Latin American military officers in state terrorism. You can carry out extraordinary renditions and order the torture of people, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of American law and carries the death penalty if the torture victim should die, and they commonly do in the case of renditions to places like Egypt.
No president since Truman, once told that he has this power, has ever failed to use it. That became the route of rapid advancement within the CIA, dirty tricks, clandestine activities, the carrying out of the president’s orders to overthrow somebody, starting — the first one was the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It’s from that, the After Action Report, which has only recently been declassified, that the word "blowback" that I used in the first of my three books on American foreign policy, that’s where the word "blowback" comes from. It means retaliation for clandestine activities carried out abroad.
But these clandestine activities also have one other caveat on them: they are kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation does come, they’re unable ever to put it in context, to see it in cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another cycle of blowback. The best example is easily 9/11 in 2001, which was clearly blowback for the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, namely the recruiting, arming and sending into battle of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. But this is the way the CIA has evolved.
It’s been responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and bringing to power probably the most odious dictator on either side in the Cold War, namely General Augusto Pinochet; the installation of the Greek colonels in the late ’60s and early ’70s in Greece; the coups, one after another, in numerous Latin American countries, all under the cover of avoiding Soviet imperialism carried out by Fidel Castro, when the real purpose was to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, and continued to exploit the extremely poor and essentially defenseless people of Central America.
The list is endless. The overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, the bringing to power of General Suharto, then the elimination of General Suharto when he got on our nerves. It has a distinctly Roman quality to it. And this is why I — moreover, there is no effective oversight. There are a few, often crooked congressmen, like Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who are charged with oversight. When Charlie Wilson, the congressman, long-sitting congressman from the Second District of Texas, was named chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee during the Afghan period, he wrote at once to his pals in the CIA, "The fox is in the henhouse. Gentlemen, do anything you want to."
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson has just finished his trilogy. The first was Blowback, then Sorrows of Empire, now Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We’ll be back with the conclusion of the interview in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return to the conclusion of my interview with Chalmers Johnson. Professor Johnson is a noted expert on Asia politics. He has authored a number of books on the Chinese revolution, on Japanese economic development. In his thirty years in the University of California system, Johnson served as chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I asked him to talk about China’s role as a growing world power.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: I’m optimistic about China. I think that they have shown a remarkable movement toward moderation. I believe that the public supports them, because they’ve done something that the public wanted done and was extremely fearful about, namely the dismantling of a Leninist economy without reducing the conditions that occurred in Yeltsin’s Russia, that China has — it’s unleashed its fantastic growth potential and is moving ahead with great power and insight.
There are many things that we do not like in the way this is developing, particularly the fear of China by the American neoconservatives. They have no alternative but to adjust to this. It’s the same kind of adjustment that should have been made in the 20th century to the rise of new sources of power in Germany, in Russia, in Japan. The failure by the sated English-speaking powers — above all, England and the United States — to adjust led to savage and essentially worthless wars. But the Americans are again continuing to harp on China’s growth, where, in fact, I’ve been impressed with the ease with which China has adjusted to the interests of countries that do not necessarily like China at all — Indonesia, for example, Vietnam.
They are contiguously egging on the Japanese to be antagonistic toward China, which was the scene of their greatest war crimes during World War II, for which they have never adequately either responded or paid compensation. I wonder what foolishness is this. A war with China would have the same — it would have the same configuration as the Vietnam War. We would certainly lose it.
The glue, the political glue of China today, the source of its legitimacy, is increasingly Chinese nationalism, which is passionately held. As the Hong Kong joke has it, China just had a couple of bad centuries, and it’s back.
We have not been watching it with quite the hawk eyes we were during the first months of the Bush administration, when, after a spy incident in which the Chinese forced down one of our reconnaissance planes that was penetrating their coastal areas in an extremely aggressive manner — if it had been a Chinese plane off of our coast, we would have shot it down; they simply forced it down, it was a loss of an airplane and one of their own pilots — that, you’ll recall, George Bush said on television that he would, if the Chinese ever menaced the island of Taiwan, he would use the full weight and force of the American military against China. This is insanity, genuine insanity. There’s no way that — I mean, if the Chinese defeated every single American, they’d still have 800 million of them left, and you simply have to adjust to that, not antagonize it, and I believe there’s plenty of ample evidence that you can adjust to the Chinese.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, in January, the Chinese launched their first anti-satellite test, and I wanted to segue into that to the militarization of space.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, precisely, I have a chapter in Nemesis that I’m extremely proud of called "The Ultimate Imperialist Project: Outer Space." It’s about the congressional missile lobby, the fantastic waste of funds on things that we know don’t work. But they’re not intended to work. They’re part of military Keynesianism, of maintaining our economy through military expenditures. They provide jobs in as many different constituencies as the military-industrial complex can place them.
We have arrogantly talked about full-spectrum dominance of control of the globe from outer space, the domination of the low and high orbits that are so necessary. We’ve all become so dependent upon them today for global positioning devices, telecommunications, mapping, weather forecasting, one thing after another. In fact, the Chinese, the Russians, the Europeans have been asking us repeatedly for decent international measures, international treaties, to prevent the weaponization of space, to prevent the growing catastrophe of orbiting debris that are extremely lethal to satellites, to — as Sally Ride, one of the commanders of our space shuttle, she was in an incident in which a piece of paint, or in orbit — that’s at 17,000 miles an hour in low-earth orbit — hit the windshield of the challenger and put a bad dent in it.
Now, if a piece of paint can do that, I hate to tell you what a lens cap or an old wrench or something like that — so there’s a whole bunch of them out there. At the Johnson Space Center, they keep a regular growing inventory of these old pieces of, some case, weaponry, some case, launch vehicles for satellites, things of this sort. They publish a very lovely little newsletter that talks about how a piece of an American space capsule from twenty years ago rear-ended a shot Chinese-launched vehicle and produced a few more debris. It’s a catastrophe.
But instead, we’ve got — there’s no other word for it — an arrogant, almost Roman, out-of-control Air Force that continues to serve the interests of the military-industrial complex, the space lobby, to build things that they know won’t work.
AMY GOODMAN: What is a space Pearl Harbor?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: A space Pearl Harbor would mean, they believe, what the Chinese did in January, when they tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of their old and redundant satellites. Satellites do burn out. There’s no way to repair them, so they simply shot it down with a rocket. This explosion produces massive amounts of debris, whizzing around the earth in low-earth orbit. If you put it higher into orbit, you would start killing off the main satellites on which, well, probably this television broadcast is going to depend on, too. And there’s no way to ever get rid of things that are orbiting in high-earth orbit. Low-earth orbit, some of them will descend into the atmosphere and burn up.
But the Air Force has continuously used this so-called threat of our being blinded by — because we have become so reliant on global positioning systems. Our so-called "smart bombs" depend on them, that we’ve — they’re not very smart, and it’s not as good a global positioning system as the peaceful one the Europeans are building called Galileo. They use it to say we must arm space, we must have anti-satellite weapons in space, we have rebuffed every effort to control this, and finding out the Chinese have called our bluff.
AMY GOODMAN: Where does Fort Greely, Alaska, fit into this, the silos?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that is, there’s three ways to shoot down an alleged incoming missile. This is the whole farce of whether there is a defense against a missile. I guarantee you there is no defense at all against the Topol-M, the Russian missile that goes into orbit extremely rapidly — it goes into its arch extremely rapidly. It has a maneuvering ability that means that it’s undetectable.
We’re basically looking at very low-brow weapons that would be coming from a country like North Korea, in which we have three different ways of trying to intercept them. We used to only try to do with one under the Clinton administration. Under the enthusiasm of the current neoconservatives, we have three ways. One, on blastoff, this is extremely difficult to do, but we’re trying to create a laser, carried in a Boeing 747, that would hit one. You’ve got to be virtually on top of the launch site in order to do so. It’s never worked. It probably doesn’t work, and it’s just expensive.
The much more common one would be to down the hostile missile, while it is in outer space, from having given up its launch vehicle and is now heading at very high speed toward the United States. This is what the interceptors that have been put in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and a couple of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, are supposed to do. They have never once yet had a successful intercept. The radar is not there to actually track the allegedly hostile vehicle. As one senior Pentagon scientist said the other day, these are really essentially scarecrows, hoping that they would scare off the North Koreans.
This is a catastrophic misuse of resources against a small and failed communist state, North Korea. There is no easier thing on earth to detect than a hostile missile launch, and the proper approach to preventing that is deterrence. We have thought about it, worked on it, practiced it, studied it now for decades. The North Koreans have an excellent reputation for rationality. They know if they did launch such a vehicle at Japan or at the United States, they would disappear the next day in a retaliatory strike, and they don’t do it.
It’s why, in the case of Iran, the only logical thing to do is to learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. It’s inevitable for a country now surrounded by nuclear powers — the United States in the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union, Israel, Pakistan and India. The Iranians are rationalists and recognize the only way you’re ever going to dissuade people from using their nuclear power to intimidate us is a threat of retaliation. So we are developing our minimal deterrent, and we should learn to live with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chalmers Johnson, you have just completed your trilogy. Your first book, Blowback, then Sorrows of Empire, and now finally Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. What is your prediction?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, I don’t see any way out of it. I think it’s gone too far. I think we are domestically too dependent on the military-industrial complex, that every time — I mean, it’s perfectly logical for any Secretary of Defense to try and close military bases that are redundant, that are useless, that are worn out, that go back to the Civil War. Any time he tries to do it, you produce an uproar in the surrounding community from newspapers, television, priests, local politicians: save our base.
The two mother hens of the Defense Facilities Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the people committed to taking care of our bases are easily Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of California, the two states with the largest number of military bases, and those two senators would do anything in their power to keep them open. This is the insidious way in which the military-industrial complex has penetrated into our democracy and gravely weakened it, produced vested interests in what I call military Keynesianism, the use and manipulation of what is now three-quarters of a trillion dollars of the Defense budget, once you include all the other things that aren’t included in just the single appropriation for the Department of Defense.
This is a — it’s out of control. We depend upon it, we like it, we live off of it. I cannot imagine any President of any party putting together the coalition of forces that could begin to break into these vested interests, any more than a Gorbachev was able to do it in his attempted reforms of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
AMY GOODMAN: Is there anything, Chalmers, that gives you hope?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing this morning. That is, the only way — you’ve got to reconstitute the constitutional system in America, or it is over. That is that empires — once you go in the direction of empire, you ultimately lead to overstretch, bankruptcy, coalitions of nations hostile to your imperialism. We’re well on that route.
The way that it might be stopped is by a mobilization of inattentive citizens. I don’t know that that’s going to happen. I’m extremely dubious, given the nature of conglomerate control of, say, the television networks in America for the sake of advertising revenue. We see Rupert Murdoch talking about buying a third of the Los Angeles Times. But, nonetheless, there is the internet, there is Amy Goodman, there are — there’s a lot more information than there was.
One of the things I have experienced in these three books is a much more receptive audience of alarmed Americans to Nemesis than to the previous two books, where there was considerable skepticism, so that one — if we do see a renaissance of citizenship in America, then I believe we could recapture our government. If we continue politics as in the past, then I think there is no alternative but to say Nemesis is in the country, she’s on the premises, and she is waiting to carry out her divine mission.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, his new book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It’s the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.

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Over the ashes of blood marched the civilized soldiers,

Over the ruins of the french fortress of a failure

Over the silent screams of the dead and the dying

Saying please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



The treaties were signed, the country was split into sections

But growing numbers of prisons were built for protection

Rapidly filling with people who called for elections

But please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



Ngo dinh diem was the puppet who danced for the power

The hero of hate who gambled on hell for his hour

Father of his country was stamped on the medals we showered

But please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



Machine gun bullets became the bloody baptizers

And the falcon copters dont care if someones the wiser

But the boy in the swamp didnt know he was killed by advisers

So please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



And fires were spitting at forests in defoliation

While the people were pressed into camps not called concentration

And the greater the victory the greater the shame of the nation

But please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



While we were watching the prisoners were tested by torture

And vicious and violent gasses maintained the order

As the finest washington minds found slogans for slaughter

But please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



Then over the border came the bay of pigs planes of persuasion

All remaining honor went up in flames of invasion

But the shattered schools never learned that its not escalation

But please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



Were teaching freedom for which they are yearning

While were dragging them down to the path of never returning

But, well condescend to talk while the cities are burning

But please be reassured, we seek no wider war.



And the evil is done in hopes that evil surrenders

But the deeds of the devil are burned too deep in the embers

And a world of hunger in vengeance will always remember

So please be reassured, we seek no wider war,

We seek no wider war.

phil ochs